ROOTS AND TUBERS. 5 



they contain. Dr. Lyon Playfair suggested that a good brown bread 

 could be made by rasping down beet-roots with an equal quantity of 

 flour, observing that the average quality of flour contains about 12 per 

 cent, of nitrogenous matter and the average quality of beet only 

 2 per cent. The garden beet and the variety of sugar beet of France 

 are about equal in value in sugar, containing 10 per cent. , the water in 

 the root being upwards of 82 per cent. Some sugar beets, however, 

 contain a much higher percentage of sugar. The albuminoids or nitro- 

 genous matters being only 0'4 per cent., the nutrient ratio is 1 : 29, the 

 nutrient value 12. 



FIG. 1. WILD BEET (perennial). Quarter natural size. 



CABJROT. 



This is a native wild plant, Daucus Carota, L., of botanists, and 

 common everywhere. It is known as " bird's nests " in the country 

 from the peculiar way in which the umbel bearing the fruit curls 

 inwards into a cup-like form (fig. 2). 



The carrot and parsnip, as well as the skirret, are not easily distin- 

 guished in the writings of the ancients. The Greeks had three words 

 Sisaron, first occurring in the writings of Epicharmus, a comic poet 

 (500 B.C.); Staphylinos is used by Hippocrates (430 B.C.); and 

 Elaphoboscum by Dioscorides (1st century A.D.). The Latin writer 

 Pliny (1st century A.D.) has the words Pastinaca, Daucus, and Sicer or 

 Siserum. He thus writes: "There is one kind of wild pastinaca, 



